A campaign group has called for an end to commercial ‘lock-in’ in the cloud market in a bid to give domestic operators a greater opportunity to compete.

The Open Cloud Coalition, which was formed in October last year, condemned the “anti-competitive practices” by Big Tech cloud operators such as discriminatory licensing, lack of interoperability and high exit fees, which it said “results in concerning levels of market concentration that impact competitiveness and create significant risks.”

The group launched its new manifesto in Brussels, Belgium, in which it called for the better regulation of commercial incentives and the reform of public sector procurement rules.

Speaking at the event, German MEP Andreas Schwab said: “The cloud market has plenty of small operators but there are also the big ones. The more you dig inside the more you discover that it makes the market entry for other cloud providers almost impossible.

“These companies…don’t want you to leave so you cannot easily change [provider] or run applications from outside on the cloud service that you have. All this makes it very difficult for every competitor, not only for UK and European competitors but for competitors worldwide.

“We believe that open markets need fair competition because only with fair competition can we create the innovation we need in Europe.”

Mark Boost, CEO of British cloud company CIVO, a member of the coalition, told UKTN: “The big providers have very deep pockets and are able to entice people with large sums of money in terms of cloud credits, and once they lock them into that proprietary ecosytem it’s very hard to get out.

“We see that day in, day out and for me it’s the biggest single reason that we haven’t got a competitive market. I would limit the amount of free credits being given out…and it’s then about an open ecosystem and less proprietary tech, and the freedom to move easily between providers.

“We want a competitive cloud environment where the customer has choice and at the moment it’s too much weighted in favour of very few big tech companies and the power should be going back to the customer.”

Cloud computing has become one of the hottest areas of investment in the UK, with billions of pounds in investment already committed for the construction of data centres so far in 2025.

The number of planning applications for data centres rose as much as 40% in the UK in 2024 as cloud companies raced to catch up with ever-growing demand for compute in AI, a UKTN analysis found.

Read more: The UK cloud market doesn’t have to be this way

The manifesto launch comes as Britain’s competition regulator has warned that poor levels of competition in the cloud market could be costing the UK hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had provisionally found that there are adverse market effects in cloud services provided in the UK, meaning that competition “is not working as well as it could be, which is likely to be leading to higher costs, less choice, less innovation and lower quality of service for businesses and organisations across the UK economy.”

In an illustrative example, the CMA said that if prices are on average 5% above those in well-functioning markets, this would in aggregate lead to UK customers paying around £430 million more per year for these services than they would in more competitive markets. Spending on cloud services has been increasing at a rate of 30% per year, the regulator said, meaning that the cost to the economy was likely to get worse over time without effective remedies.

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